Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
It seems as though ‘Alice’ and here colony are settling in well to their new home. Yes, we’ve not only named the hives – Clettwr and Leri, but the queens of each colony have names too. Ffion for the queen in Leri and Alice for the queen in Clettwr. Alice’s colony is a little behind...
They may be considered weeds, but… They grow better than anything else around here. The guinea pigs love to eat the leaves. We can eat them and even make dandelion flower cookies. The bright yellow flowers are lovely. The seed heads are impressive. The bees can make honey from them. I think it’s time we...
The Aberystwyth Beekeepers Association has a photographic competition coming up, so Morgan and I are going to enter. The categories are: Inside the Hive Beekeepers Other Bees (not the honey bee) We are only allowed one photo per category so I now have to choose a single photo for each. I have to make sure Morgan...
Fortunately, the day after discovering we had queen cells in one of our new bee hives we had a meeting of the Aberystwyth Beekeepers Association. We therefore turned up at the meeting, along with my iPad loaded with a photo of the queen cells so that we could get some advice and opinions from other...
Just over a week had passed since our first hive inspection and after our walk at Ynyshir, the sun came out, the wind eased a little so we had a perfect window of opportunity to make our second hive inspection. We were hoping to find that the bees had built out comb on a few...
Since we’ve been planning to keep honey bees, we’ve also been trying to make the garden as bee-friendly as possible. The idea was to plant bee-friendly plants, but still keep the garden looking nice. We wanted it to be a nice place for bees and humans alike. Sounds easy really, we like flowers, bees like...
We carried out our first proper hive inspection on Friday, on both our hives (Clettwr and Leri). As new beekeepers it was all very exciting but seemed to go pretty well. The plan was to go through the hives, try to spot the queens and if possible mark them, see if the bees had started...
We’ve been watching our new bees coming and going and they certainly seem to be bringing back quite a bit of pollen. This is of course good news, but although we have a pollen chart I don’t think that identifying the pollen is going to be easy. The pollen chart really only shows the colour...
Llwyncelyn garden in Glandyfi was open on Sunday as part of the National Garden Scheme, so we had a little family outing to visit it. The National Garden Scheme sees provate gardens all over the country open in aid of charity and I’m sure many people go along for a nose as much as anything...
An important aspect of successful beekeeping is that of keeping accurate records. It allows you to know what is, and has been, going on inside your hives which in time should provide useful data that will help you manage your stocks more effectively. From your records you should be able to tell what has been...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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